When I was planning this project, I first wanted to research
what other people thought would be a good visual representation of curiosity. Quite
a few people said cats, children or things like paint brushes etc... These
ideas where okay but I want to make my animation more like an info graphic so I wanted
to keep it quite formal. I had a look at
some of the examples of others work on the RSA website and I did like a few of
the ideas however I wanted to make mine more simple in a way.
From this
I decided that I was going to represent curiosity as a colour. To not make the animation
look too over done I decided to keep the colour scheme quite simple so that the
colour would stand out against all the other images.
Next
I broke down the speech into different sections and started coming up with
ideas for each one. One of my favourite ones was having a lightbulb for the
part of the text that was talking about ideas. I also really liked the idea of
having the outline of a person’s head with different bits of knowledge around
it. After coming up with these various ideas I started creating my storyboard.
Along with having the idea to show curiosity as a colour, I thought
of a different idea that was inspired by the direct line TV advert. This was to
have a spline path and a tracer object that would draw out the different
objects. When I was drawing some of these objects out in Photoshop I realised
that it would be quite hard to make some of them look realistic. There was also
the issue of timings as I didn’t want the tracer to go too quickly around some
of the objects.
Once I had my storyboard finished I got some feedback on it.
Everyone liked my idea but did suggest some small changes. One thing that was
mentioned that I should change was to have the globe at the end fade back into
a ball of solid colour. This would make the animation loop to show that
curiosity was this little thing that had to be nurtured at first but then went
on to affect the whole world and then have it go back to being nurtured. I really
liked this idea and decided to change my storyboard to show this. Another thing
hat was mentioned that I decided to change was the idea I had to have a person’s
head and the different bits of knowledge pop up around there head. It was
suggested that I maybe have lines come from the head to connect these few
objects. Also someone mentioned that I should have cogs in the persons head
that spin as this is happening to make it look like there is more going on in
the scene.
After adjusting
my storyboard I then went into cinema 4d to create an animatic. But first I decided
to take the audio track into Premiere pro and get the timings right. I didn’t want
to create a whole dope sheet as I wasn’t going to lip sync, but I just wanted a
good idea as to when the different words were said.
Next I went back into Photoshop to get the images from my
storyboard. I deleted the background from all of them and saved them
individually so that I could easily create alpha maps in cinema4d. At this
point I noticed that some of the images were not very high quality so I had to
change them to get a smoother shape.
After all the images were created I started to lay out lots
of planes in cinema4d. I was going to keep most of the different animations
static and have the camera move around to different scenes.
Once I had the first lot of planes in place I added the
textures to them. I then added a camera to the scene and started animating it. For
now I wasn’t sticking to the timing sheet that I made so nothing was in time
yet. For now I was only going to create
the planes and other elements up to the scene with the lightbulb. I did this because
I wanted to make sure everything worked well before I went onto the second
half. One of the hard parts of doing
this first half was getting the books to fall at a decent speed, and to have
their visibility match.
Another element that was tricky was having the lines coming
out of the head. I had some trouble with their visibility. Also I had wanted to
use spline paths and tracers for this but I didn’t want to add render time for
such a small element. Also at this point I only added the cogs to the head as a
texture as I wanted to get the majority of the animating done before I went
back to add the little details.
Once I had finished the first half, I continued to animate
the camera, but this time adjusting it to the timings that I wrote down. As I hadn’t
added the sound yet this was the only thing I really had to go on about the
timings. At this point I was quite behind and the animatic so far had taken
much too long to make so instead of rendering it out to check that everything
was on time I carried on with making the second half.
In my
plans my favourite part was the lightbulb. I only did a quick version of what
it would have looked like at this point but I didn’t really like it. It didn’t really
go with the other parts of the animation.
The one part of the second half that I wasn’t sure about is
when I wanted to have the cog spin and have a computer and other electronics appear
next to it. This seemed like a decent idea when I was doing the story board but
now I realised that it was meant to show technology replacing routine work not
joining it. But at this point I left it how it was so that I could just make
sure the camera moved in time.
In my storyboard I also had the next few sections down as
something quite simple but when I put recreated them in cinema4d they didn’t look
right. They were very basic and not much was going on, but I left them for now
and carried on.
Once the whole animatic was finished I went through and made
sure that the camera movements were matched up with my timings sheet. I then
rendered this out and added the sound in Premiere. I now noticed that I must
have got some of the timings wrong on my sheet as there were some parts of the
animation that didn’t match up at all. We had to present what we had so far to
our group and it was the first thing that was noticed. I then spent the next few days changing the
camera movements and rendering out my work several times to get the timings to
match. After this we had another group session where it was agreed that
everything now worked well.
Now that
I had everything in time I wanted to go over and add the little details in. the
first thing I had to correct was the scene where I had the books falling onto
curiosity and creativity. I moved the camera slightly when I was adjusting it
to the timings and now the books were visible at the top of the frame. Also the
circles I used for curiosity and creativity were not in sync and the visibility
tags that I had animated were working correctly.
The part where the cogs were meant to move in the persons
head was quite tricky to fix. I added the different cogs onto separate planes,
but when I tried to animate them turning it would move on all axis and looked
very warped. I left this how it was for now and moved onto the part with the
lightbulb.
I created this part in a separate document as cinema 4d
became very laggy. I added more geometry to the spline path so that it flowed a
lot better. I also added luminescence to the inner lightbulb texture. I think
this worked particularly well as I could still see the background I used
throughout the animation and it made it flow a lot better.
One of the parts that I was least happy with when doing the
animatic was the part with the wheel and the computers. I didn’t think it was a
very good way to represent how technology was replacing routine work. From this
I came up with the idea of having a bulldozer that would come along and push it
out of the scene. Finding an image that was good enough to use was quite tricky
as most of the ones I found were quite low quality. Also matching up the speed
of the bulldozer and the cog was tricky as the cog kept moving inside the
bulldozer.
The parts that followed this section of the animation were
hard for me to replace or improve. I couldn’t decide on anything to do that
would work in the small timeframe I had to animate. I decided to leave the
parts as they were and just adjust the speed and timings of the question marks
that popped up.
On the final part with the globe I just adjusted the timing
of the fade out so that it didn’t look too dragged out.
I rendered out what I had so far and was pretty happy with
it. I got some feedback about the beginning of the animation and a few people
said that the camera movement was much too quick. To fix this I decided to keep
the camera mostly static and have the different elements appear of the same
frame. This was quite hard to fix because I had to play around with the visibility
of the different objects, and even though I deleted the different camera positions
I didn’t want it still seemed to follow this track. To try and get around this I
key framed the camera several times so that it would stay where I wanted it
too, and so that it wouldn’t drift off to the side during the next section of
the animation.
After I had fixed this I went and rendered my work out
again. I started to notice that some of the elements were not appearing quick
enough or appearing when they shouldn’t. I realised after a while that I had
made a silly mistake. When I was animating the visibility of some of the
objects I used the values of 0 and 1 instead of 0 and 100. I did this because
in the editor when I set the value of 1 the object was shown fully but then
when rendered it hardly appeared at all.
I now went back to finishing the cogs on the persons head. I
discovered that if I animated them spinning from a single view (in this case
front) they would not warp. Also when I rendered it out the last time, I added
a fade transition between this part and the light bulb but it didn’t look right
because I had the spline path drop from the top of the frame. I decided to have
a spline path come down from the head and then fade the scenes together. Because
I did this in 2 files it was hard to match up the two spline paths and even though I made them both the same
width , because the camera was a different distance away in each scene I had to
keep changing this value to make it match as best as I could.
Once everything was rendered and put together again, I played
my animation to a few people. Everyone agreed that it worked well, however one
person did suggest that I changed a scene. They suggested that during the part
where curiosity is the wellspring of creativity, I should have the words
creativity used instead of water droplets. At the time I misunderstood this and
made creativity a word that soaked up the droplets from the creativity. I think
that the other idea would have also worked well but I think it looked a lot better
than it did.
I wanted to animate the texture on the word creativity and I
did this by using a noise on the texture and changed the colours from white to
blue. When I added this texture to the letters it would only work properly if I
used the spatial mapping. I didn’t realise that when the camera then moves down
to the next scene, the texture moves and the text looks like a cloud.
At first I didn’t really like this effect but then I thought
that actually it looks like the rain that turns the cog is coming down from the
cloud.
This is what my final submission looked like:
